ndrew's BlogCategory: talks
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From Vim to Presentation Slides [talks, vim]
There’s a little-known Vim command called
:TOhtmlthat does something quite surprising for a built-in – it converts the current Vim window into raw HTML. This includes syntax highlighting for code, and even line numbers. It can convert the full buffer or a range of selected lines.While I’ve always considered it a fun trick, it was somewhat recently that I realized it has a very practical use – to paste syntax-highlighted code into presentation slides.
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The "Back to School" idea [education, talks]
OHM was a place full of amazing ideas and clever hacks. In this atmosphere, a friend and I started talking about our education system and the age-old promise of “multimedia” in the classroom. It’s a popular topic these days, education. Startups like coursera are providing free online lessons, clever tools like geddit are trying to improve teacher-student interaction. What Vloo and me discussed was using presentation slides in class in order to improve engagement.
Something like this is already in use in my home country of Bulgaria. There are specialized classrooms equipped with computers and projectors, and every once in a while, the students have an “interactive class”, where they watch videos and perform quizzes. However, this is something that happens rarely and is considered a “special” lesson. I was more interested in turning any lesson into an actual lecture. Just as lecturers at tech conferences teach me about the latest, greatest web framework, it should be perfectly possible to use the same tools for a chemistry, or biology, or history lecture.
As we were describing what a lesson would look like, we realized we could actually prepare one. We dubbed the event “Back to School” and I started working on a chemistry lecture to present at the local hackerspace, initLab.
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Documentation [documentation, talks]
I recently participated in RogueConf, a small Bulgarian conference. I talked about documentation, how and when to write it, how to write tools to help you out. The video is on youtube, and the slides are on speakerdeck, though it’s all in Bulgarian. This post is the TL;DR of the talk. I’m going to run through my main points, skipping over the demos and most of the examples. Eventually, I’ll extract some simple documentation tools from work in the dawanda/doctools repository, but there is still some effort needed to make them generally usable, I’m afraid.
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Vimberlin: Lessons Learned from Building Splitjoin [talks, vim]
At the November Vimberlin meetup, I talked about my exprience of building a plugin, what decisions I made and what lessons I took away from it all. My hope was that the attendees could use my ideas in their own code, and maybe become motivated to get coding themselves. Here’s a short summary of the basic ideas I presented.
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OpenFest 2012: Taking Over the World with Vim [talks, vim]
This year, I did a talk at OpenFest about Vim. I tried to make a few interesting points about Vim and why it’s awesome. In the end, it turned out to have too much talk and not enough mind-blowing plugin demos, which I should probably work on for next time.
For now, I’d like to quickly go over the three main points that I hope people took away from the talk. The slides are uploaded to speakerdeck, though they’re almost certainly useless without the demos and my explanations (not to mention they’re in Bulgarian).